The rivalry, the insults, and how Sgt Pepper began as Macca’s holiday disguise
Thought you knew everything about the Beatles? A hilarious new Fab Four book might prove you wrong
IF THEY are remembered for one record, it will always be Sgt Pepper. But who, of the 32 million fans who’ve bought and re-bought the Beatles’ greatest album over the past 53 years, knows where the idea came from? The secret lies in a solo road-trip made by Paul McCartney at the height of Beatlemania.
Sick of the adulation, hemmed in by fans, pressured by the record company to come up with more and more hits, he needed time alone. By the autumn of 1966, the band he’d helped create had played a staggering 1,400 live shows and had vowed to play no more.
They’d become too famous for their own good and, aged just 24, McCartney wanted a break. He visited a shop in London’s West End called Wig Creations and had himself measured for a false moustache. Then he bought a pot of Vaseline to grease back his famous locks. Fake spectacles and a long coat completed the transformation, and off he drove in his Aston Martin through France.
The long and winding road eventually took him to Spain where he chose to leave the car and fly home. On his flight home with long-time roadie Mal Evans, the idea entered his head that, if only the band could lose their identities, as he had successfully done on his holiday, they might play on.
“With this alter-ego band, it won’t be us making all that sound, it won’t be the Beatles, it’ll be this other band, so we’ll be able to lose our identities in them.”
But what would they call themselves? At that point, their in-flight meals arrived, complete with packets marked “S” and “P”.
“What’s that mean?” asked Evans, before replying to his own question: “Oh, salt and pepper.” Without thinking, Paul blurted out: “Sergeant Pepper.” And so Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was born, and the Beatles were saved for greater things.
THIS, and a zillion other unknown tales of the Fab Four, are the basis of Craig Brown’s latest best-seller, One Two Three Four. There’s a fresh Beatles bible for each new generation and this whopping great tome, all 656 pages of it, is perfect for these leisure-filled days. Brown sums up the band’s story in two short sentences: “The Beatles began 1963 in relative obscurity but ended it the most famous group in the country. Within another six weeks they were the most famous group in the world.”
It’s all there, from the Quarrymen skiffle group to the Mersey sound, from Brian Epstein to Beatlemania, from the Maharishi to the drugs and the money and the bitter parting of the ways.
It’s a quirky and highly personal mix of letters, anecdotes, diary entries, fan memories and musical analysis – with a large helping of the adorable Brown thrown in.
For example, just for the hell of it, he decides to list all the famous people who appear on artist Peter Blake’s iconic Sgt Pepper album cover.
Interesting in itself, but what’s fascinating is he discovers there’s an invisible Sophia Loren lurking in there somewhere. And that John would have had Jesus in there but was vetoed by the other members of the group.
Early on, you learn where
Lennon got his acid tongue. Soon after he and Yoko Ono hooked up, he took her off to meet his Aunt Mimi who raised him after his mother died in a car accident. “Well, I didn’t like the look of her from the start,” Mimi recalled later. “She looked just like a dwarf. I said to him, who’s the poison dwarf, John?” And from then on, Craig brilliantly lampoons the woman who broke up the Beatles. He points out that while she may have amassed a $600million fortune she still needs to ask for spiritual help on Twitter.
Recently, he recalls, she posted a Tweet begging for advice “that will make our lives heal and shine”.
A measure of how highly Yoko is regarded by Beatles fans can be gauged from the responses: “Put Marmite on your toast before you put it under the grill,” wrote one sardonically.
“Avoid Tesco Value Rice Krispies, they’re really terrible,” wrote another.
Across the book there are many revelations, big and small.
Why has nobody ever noticed before, for example, that Ringo is Japanese for Apple?
He recounts the jealousy of Cliff Richard – until the Beatles’ arrival, Britain’s king of the pop charts – on being dumped by the media the moment Beatlemania gripped the nation.
Brown follows the Beatles legend through encounters with marijuana and LSD while notching up the hits along the way. Such is the power of the group’s legacy that, 50 years after they split, there are more than 1,000 Beatles tribute bands still playing worldwide today. He writes of the high-minded attempt by the Beatles to fashion a creative crucible in their famous Apple offices in London’s Savile Row, but how everyone took the Fab Four for mugs.
“Every time you turn around there are at least half-a-dozen people on the phone who don’t even work in the building,” said an accountant, gazing in wonder at the colossal phone bill.
“Since when is there an Apple office in Kathmandu? Or Acapulco?” Visitors and employees walked out of the building with TVs, electric typewriters, speakers, cases of wine and fan heaters. “We were giving out all that money and cameras and equipment to people we never saw again,” recalled Ringo. Nobody noticed one
‘I didn’t like the look of her from the start. I asked him, who’s the poison dwarf, John?’
‘We were giving out all that money and equipment to people we never saw again’
employee was surreptitiously stripping the lead off the roof, bit by bit, until the ceiling began to leak.
Brown tells some good stories about “the most fraudulent of Beatles hangers-on”, a Greek called Alexis Mardas who went by the title Magic Alex.
Indeed he was, magicking away a shedload of Beatles cash in return for inventing things that never worked – they included an X-ray camera that could see through walls, paint whose colour you could change with the flick of a switch, and a flying saucer, powered by the engines taken from George’s Ferrari and John’s Rolls Royce.
Brown is fascinating on the undercurrents of rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones – how, if Mick Jagger ever wanted to see McCartney, who lived nearby, he’d have to walk over to Paul’s house. “It was never the other way round,” recalled Jagger’s lover Marianne Faithfull.
He tells how Keith Richards would wind John up, saying he wore his guitar too high – leading Lennon to surreptitiously lengthen the strap to appear more cool.
In the Summer of Love in 67, everyone’s favourite Beatles track was All You Need Is Love, beamed out around the world on TV to an unprecedented audience of 350 million.
Brown paints a glorious picture of that evening with its celebrity-stuffed, mildly stoned audience, and an enormous bow-tied symphony orchestra. He confesses he’s watched the video 25 times “or more”. “For some reason,” he adds, waspishly, “George barely merits a look-in, and is not filmed at all during his brief guitar solo, once voted the fifthworst of all time.” Everywhere, odd quirky facts crop up that can only come from the crowded notebook of an utterly besotted Beatles fan. For example...
Jane Asher’s mother Margaret was a professor at the Guildhall School of Music, who in 1948 tutored a young George Martin in the oboe.
Martin relished his visits to the Asher home in Wimpole Street which, 15 years later, Paul McCartney made his home-fromhome when Jane was his girlfriend.
The Duchess of Windsor, in her plush exile in Paris, would sing off-key the words “I give her all my love, that’s all I do-oo.”
During early Beatlemania, 20,000 Beatles wigs were sold in just one single day in New York City.
Frank Sinatra hated the Beatles but was forced to admit, after recording George Harrison’s Something, it was “the greatest love song of the last 50 years”.
And a YouTube video has attracted 250,000 hits simply by playing, forwards then backwards, Sgt Pepper. Even today the
Beatles are here, there, and everywhere. But in the end the fabulous dream had to fade, the bubble had to burst.
Bound together by money, by contracts, but no longer by the music, the Beatles had become each others’ jailers and each others’ prisoners.
NOTHING could have saved them from the inevitable divorce and in 1970 they announced the parting of the ways. Bitterness, anger, frustration, all surfaced in the following years, and words were spoken which would better have been left unsaid. But the music, the glorious music, still surmounts it all.
In this fine celebration of their work and lives Craig Brown writes: “The Beatles’ harmonies, so vital to their music, are the luscious fruit of the coming together of opposites. Harsh and compliant, sunny and gloomy, confident and needy... from out of this union drifts beauty.” ●●One Two Three Four: The Beatles In Time by Craig Brown (Fourth Estate, £20) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co.uk. Delivery may be up to 28 days. Cheques/PO no longer accepted